Tag Archives: Serendipity

As you may have noticed, I have upgraded from Serendipity, which was creaking a bit, and seems to no longer be supported by Debian to WordPress. It was a moderately complex task, as I wanted to preserve backwards compatibility and a lot of content with mathematics and code.

I installed the Debian package, and tried to follow the instructions on the Debian wiki but they are perhaps out of date. I got an error trying to setup the database, but found it was there and functional.

IÂ then used this excellent script to help import the old serendipity data. It wasn’t without problems, the script needed to be placed (on the Debian installed package) under /var/lib/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ within a directory to be registered by WordPress as a plugin, but I got that working in the end.

This was an attempt to preserve ID fields as well. It seems to have worked – which has simplified redirects (see below). Comments have been “flattened” as the script warned, and there’s clearly a character-set issue here and there, but these weren’t serious issues for me. Your mileage may vary.

I found a good plugin for GeHSI style code formatting which I was using in Serendipity, albeit the syntax is very slightly different so I have some work to do editing a few entries (I don’t want to attempt a global SQL regexp find and replace if I don’t have to). I found this excellent seeming plugin for Latex and switched it into site-wide mode. So far, checking a few old articles, it JustWorks (TM).

Some of my old posts have images in the serendipity media folders that will need moved, but I was keen to have links to the old blog redirect automatically. I was able to use

I can start to dismantle the rest of serendipity, except for the media, quite soon now. It’s nice to have a platform that respects multiple device layouts, and hopefully comment spam will be easier to control too. A sample of most articles show they render OK, there are a few gotchas, and I’ll try to work through them in time.